How the heck as a beginner are you meant to fight your way through all the noise of the old, bad ways of doing things? How is a beginner meant to know that really they should be using ES2015 and webpack rather than JS and gulp/grunt? How does a beginner even come to understand that in the reactJS world they might be reading something relevant, but then again they might be reading something completely irrelevant and in compatible (i.e. ES2015 verus JS).
Really when a new technology comes along that is a clear "winner", serious consideration should be given to just getting rid of the "old" way.
Unless Grunt and Gulp are going to somehow make a big comeback, the should be loudly killed off.
Damn - whenever I read the React documentation I have to filter out all the irrelevant code that is not ES2015. Why is all that non-ES2015 code there still?
Old tech should be visibly and loudly killed. No wonder its hard for beginners - its all the damn noise made by the "old" ways of doing things.
The react ecosystem is filled with the living dead - technology that has died but just won't go away.
Things should remain backward compatible but only for a very short window, it's really unhelpful to have many many different ways of doing the same thing, it fragments everything including the learning curve. Witness Perl.
Beginners (and I am one) don't need to be shown every possible way to do things - they need be given a rock solid, opinionated path on the current right way to get the job done. I don't care if that opinionated path changes every month, I just want to not have to work it out by fighting through two years of zombie tech to eventually figure it out.